Saturday, July 14, 2012

The Days Are Fabulous

We've been having a few violin issues here during the past two weeks.  Ted has just simply refused to pick up his violin.  Not at all interested.  This comes on the back of his week of real practise, where he was using his fingers and working hard to get the fingering right for his first lesson after being taught the opening sequence of Twinkle.  I let the first week pass by thinking that he had just burnt out, spent all of his energy and focus in the previous week.  In the second week he picked up his violin a bit for fun play, but only a couple of times and not with the same enthusiasm he had previously.  Luckily I had borrowed The Suzuki Violinist from Alina (my handy Suzuki librarian) and it is pretty much a textbook on ways to promote intrinsic motivation towards practise with younger (and older) children.

The other day Ted asked me to play some role playing game with him and I said "How about we play Tori and Teddy?  You be Tori and I will be Teddy" - he jumped at the chance and showed me all about how to use my fingers, picking them up and dropping them down at the appropriate times during the piece.  He then took the violin from me and played with it for fun for about twenty minutes.  Woot!  The love was back!  Then last night James secured us all some tickets to this and we all walked down to Angel Place. Harriet was most thrilled to have a reason to wear her velvet jacket out again (despite it being an unseasonably warm evening).

We sat down, there were a couple of uncomfortably long speeches for a three year old to endure.  And then - they started!  And literally fifteen seconds into it, Ted starts crying for food.  Crying!  Oh dear.  James gallantly took the fall and walked him out to try and find some food in the middle of the city after dark.  The end result being of course that they had to walk blocks and blocks away to find some avocado sushi.  Meanwhile Harriet is falling all over the seats in our row, whispering when is it going to be OH-VER and generally not being at all happy. 

Me?  I was the only satisfied individual of the evening.  God, I loved it.  I've had such a short exposure to the world of classical music, with absolutely nothing to go on, no base knowledge or appreciation or anything.  Watching these children play and then watching Emily Sun play her solo was totally fabulous.  Actually it was a shame she came out so early really, because when everyone played after she'd left, it highlighted just how jaw-droppingly good she is and how far the rest of the orchestra had to go. 

Anyway, this aside, Ted and James did end up coming back and watching the last fifteen minutes or so on the screens in the foyer.  Ted loved how Aiko Goto was so short that they gave her two wooden steps to stand on so that the others could see her.  So this morning he requested a step himself and played with gusto.  For ages.  And ages!  He wasn't actually 'practising' so to speak, but he did use his fingers to pretend he was playing like Aiko - ahh, words are redundant when I have this video:



(ignore Mt Washmore in the background...no!  Don't go back to check it out!  I said ignore it!!!!)

Anyway, it seems as though we may be back on track, although I'm just taking each day as it comes, especially after Alina told me the same thing happened with Oscar and it took about eight months before he regained the passion.  *eep* 

Today we had a fabulous day.  Seriously, one of the best days from beginning to end in a while. Not just because everything went smoothly but because I had fun most of the day.  Fun!  We had the violin virtuoso experience at breakfast, then on for a drop-in at the Campos birthday morning to see Lou et al., then to the Hyde Park fountain for Ted's recreation of Alexander's Outing before camping down at the Hyde Park Barracks Open Day.  Honestly, this was superbly run and pitched perfectly for the children.  Then home to a dinner partly already made and partly freshly made while the children languished in their exhausted state inside the bath together.  The main negative was that Ted refused to go to bed after having crashed in the car at 4pm (which, as every parent of a preschooler knows, is a recipe for nighttime disaster).

But even then it wasn't such a disaster, because I got to watch this amazing video, which shows how water drops don't splash into the settled water as you would have thought, but the water ball dances on top for a (teeny, tiny) fraction of a second.  Wow.



1 comment:

Lou said...

That video of Ted! Cutest 30 seconds of my day!